


(More Powerful Than) Butterfly Wings

by Tmae



Series: The Bart AU [1]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, DCU, The Flash (Comics)
Genre: AND THEN THINGS SNOWBALLED, AU where cinematic Barry is actually Bart, Gen, I blame Iris for that, because I made a joke about it when I noticed the similarities of characterisation, there's a lot of hugging in this fic, things snowballed because she is AWESOME AND TOO MUCH FUN TO WRITE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-15 02:09:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8038069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tmae/pseuds/Tmae
Summary: They say that the force of a flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane.
 In a single, decisive moment, Iris and Bart manage to hold onto each other during that first, desperate jump into the timestream.This changes everything.





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I'm actually finally posting this.  
> I started writing this fic pretty much the day after the Justice League trailer came out and I noticed that Barry seemed out of character. I made a joke about "AU where he acts like Bart because he IS Bart" and things just... things just snowballed. At first I thought it would be a 1000 word oneshot that I'd post on my tumblr and just sort of forget about.  
> And then suddenly I had approximately 4500 words and the slowly dawning realisation that I had only just finished chapter one.
> 
> I've written the entire story before posting and I'm going to be updating over the next few days, so you're not going to have to wait too long for the rest of it if you like it!

They say that the force of a flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane.

Once, in a timeline, in a universe, in a multiverse, Iris West-Allen risked it all to save her grandson’s life. She fought against her government, she broke him free of the virtual reality he grew up in, she took his hand and she jumped into the timestream with him on a desperate hope... and she felt his hand ripped from her own, could do nothing but watch as the timestream and a force of which neither of them knew tore him from her hands and sent them both tumbling through time _alone._

In that timeline, they would both make it to the era that she hoped, though separated. She would find her nephew, her nephew would find her grandson, and as she had hoped, one would cure the other.

But this is not a story of that timeline. The story of that timeline has been told. And in some ways it is still being told, just not here.

Here is a story of a timeline that went a little differently.

Iris West-Allen risks it all to save her grandson. She fights against her government, breaks him free of the virtual reality he has been growing up in, she takes his hand and jumps into the timestream with him on a desperate hope.

She feels his hand begin to slip from her own and her mind, her heart, her soul screams _No!_

_No! I have lost my husband, I have lost my daughter, I have lost my son. I will not lose Bart as well!_

She tightens her grip and she pulls him closer, just barely missing the moment where they were torn apart once-upon-another-timeline. She wraps both arms around him, and she feels his arms wrap around her.

They hold tight to one another, refusing to be torn apart, and thus things _change._

They say that the force of a flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane.

The force of love is so much greater than a butterfly’s wingbeat.

* * *

They do not land in the time she had hoped for.

This, on its own, would not be too great a disaster, provided the amount by which they were off was not too great to still find the help that Bart needs. But their arrival in the wrong time is not alone as an issue.

They do not even arrive in the right _universe._

This, again, would not be too great a disaster, if it were not for the _nature_ of the universe they find themselves landing in.

On almost any Earth that they could have landed on, there would be metahumans of some form. On almost any Earth that they could have landed on, they could have sought out the local heroes, whoever they may have been. On almost any Earth they could have landed on, there would be some method for them to seek a way home.

 _Almost_ any Earth.

* * *

Iris wakes to grass beneath her, a blue sky peeking through a canopy of leaves above her, and her grandson fast asleep, his arms still curled around her and hers still wrapped around him. His head is tucked under her chin, his legs halfway between being tucked under him and curled around her. For all that his mind and body are twelve, in sleep, he has automatically shifted into a position that screams of the chronological two year old he is.

This moment of waking is peaceful, and a part of her wants to let it last. There is a gentle breeze blowing across her face, rustling the leaves high above them. Faintly, in a distant but still nearby way, she can hear the murmur of people talking and the screaming laughter of children. Bart is quiet, his hummingbird heartbeat thrumming through his chest and across hers as well, his breathing calm and steady, though still more rapid than the average human's, for a speedster is a speedster, even in sleep.

A speedster is a speedster, even in sleep, and Bart is a speedster whose speed is killing him.

All her desire to let the peaceful moment last dies with the remembrance that if she does not get a move on, does not get up and get him up too, get them both moving and find Wally, Bart will age into death before he even hits double digits. She will lose another member of her family to death too young, far too young.

Her beloved Barry, gone before he even hit fifty, saving the multiverse itself with his sacrifice. Her beautiful, darling Dawn and Don, their lives stolen away barely into their twenties, protecting Earth from the Dominators. They all died heroes' deaths, a cold comfort because a death is a death and they are gone regardless, but at least she knows they died as they lived, fulfilling a calling they loved, a calling that they were all willing to die for even before their doing so was reality.

But Bart, Bart would be lost youngest of them all, and to something as meaningless as old age in his youth. A bright, incredible spark, forever lost to the world, nobody ever knowing who or what he could have been.  

_No._

No, she will not let that happen.

She shifts an arm and reaches up, placing a hand on his head and gently running her fingers through his hair.

 _"Bart?"_ she says, the Interlac falling easily off her tongue, her voice soft with the same tone she used to wake his father and his aunt when they were young. _"Bart, sweetheart, it's time to wake up now,"_

There’s a minute shift, his arms tightening ever so slightly, and then he lifts his head so quickly she almost doesn’t see him do it. His eyes are wide and her brain quickly draws a connection between the beams of sunlight and the golden hue of his irises.

 _My sunshine_ she hears Meloni’s voice say, echoing through her memory, and her heart constricts at the thought of her daughter-in-law, gone with nobody even knowing _how_ she died.

And then comes the idle thought that EarthGov had told them all that _Bart_ had died too. And if they lied about one death, why not another?

 _“Didwedoit,Grandma?”_ Bart asks, pulling her back from her train of thought, his words almost unintelligible _“Didwemakeit? Areweinthepast?”_

 _“Yes, Bart,”_ she says, smiling at him. _“We made it, we’re in the past,”_

She’s relatively sure they are, anyways. Parks like this, the kind with _real_ nature and – from the sounds of all the children – playparks out in the open, parks like this haven’t existed for a few centuries. They’re in the past, and she hopes that the _when_ is correct.

 _“Cool,”_ Bart says, barely whispering it. He grins, the expression bright and wide and so full of energy that it immediately sets off alarm bells in her mind, long since honed from having raised two speedsters already.

She’s rolled over to her front and sprung to her feet almost the instant that his weight vanishes, a crackle of lightning in the air left in his wake.

 _“Bart-!”_ she starts to call, for a moment terrified about where he might have run off to, she can’t lose him now, not _now,_ they still need to find Wally and-

-and Bart is barely a metre away. Her panic fades almost as quickly as it came.

 _“Woah,”_ Bart says, eyes wide, both his hands pressed flat against the surface of a tree trunk with his fingers splayed. _“What’s this? It feels really cool,”_

She feels a small smile tug at her lips because of his wonder, though her heart pangs at the fact that the simple _nature_ which she knew all through her childhood – all through her life, really, until that fateful day she found herself in the 30 th century – is so foreign to him.

 _“That’s a tree, Bart,”_ she says, walking over and laying a hand on his shoulder. _“You’re going to see a lot of those in this time period,”_

 _“Awesome,”_ he replies.

Something in the branches above rustles and Bart’s head snaps upwards. Iris follows his gaze and almost laughs.

 _“Just a squirrel, sweetheart,”_ she tells him, ruffling his hair.

 _Wasting time_ hisses a voice in her mind. _It’s nice spending this time with him, introducing him to these things, but that can all be done **later** when he isn’t **dying.**_

The voice is her own, and it is right - she can’t let herself become distracted.

Before they can get to tracking down Wally though...

 _“Bart,”_ she says, waiting until his attention is on her before continuing. And then, like slipping out of a pair of broken-in shoes and into comfortable year old slippers, she lets Interlac fall away and switches to the tongue of her youth “Do you remember what I taught you about English?”

* * *

The first step to finding Wally is figuring out where and when _they_ are.

The simplest way to do that would, of course, be to simply ask. But she has spent too long under Earthgov President Thawne’s rule in the future, spent too long dodging his forces in her pursuit of the truth behind her children’s deaths, and then in her pursuit of the truth of her grandson’s death, and then in her pursuit of her grandson’s _freedom_. Old habits die hard, and she is very, very aware that their clothing will be conspicuous for whatever era they’re in, and the last thing they need is too much attention drawn to them.

It won’t just be the date that they’ll need though. They need information on the world in general. This era is history to them, true, and therein lies the problem. It is not the day to day minutia that history remembers, let alone history a thousand years old.

A library would be good.

She lets her gaze drift to Bart. He is watching a butterfly with rapt attention, on the verge of chasing it himself, and the not-so-distant laughter of children in the park echoes in her ears.

And just like that, a solution clicks into place in her mind.

“Sweetheart,” she calls, pulling Bart’s attention to her, careful to stick to the English that they both need to make sure to speak now “I need you to do something for me,”

* * *

There’s a part of her that rails against her plan, that screams it’s too dangerous, too risky, that they shouldn’t take the chance. This is the part that stops her from just asking questions for the information that they need. She quietly and firmly shoves this part aside and shushes it. Now is not the time for the part of her that is so used to the world of the 30th Century.

Now is the time for the part of her that made her such a good reporter, in both the eras she’s lived in.

She closes her eyes, feels the bark under her palms, pressing against her back through her clothes, and _breathes._ In. Out. In. Out.

She _listens._

Even with the many, many other noises, she’s close enough to easily pick out her grandson’s voice.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” she hears him say, the line given with perfect delivery, his accent only barely audible. “Could you inform me of what the day and year is?”

It’s potentially risky, yes, but some risks should be taken and she’s not going to let fear stop them. She has experience with this, spent years doing things like this, and Bart... Bart may have grown up in a virtual environment, Bart may not quite grasp the concepts of _mortality_ or _injury_ , but he knows what the words “stealth mission” mean and he knows how to pretend to be a space captain.

And really, pretending to be a space captain is all she needs him to do.

“Pardon?” she hears their target ask, a slight hint of bemusement in her voice. There’s the slightest hint of the kind of fondness and humouring directed towards any child that you start to pick up when you have even just one of your own there too.

“The day and year. It’s vital information that I am in need of, ma’am,” Bart says, playing his part to perfection.

Iris waits, breathes, taps her fingers against the bark.

_Don’t think about the danger, don’t think about the risk, think about the information you’re here to get._

It’s a familiar mantra that she has used many times before. A small voice in the back of her head whispers a count between Bart’s words being spoken and their target’s not-yet-delivered reply. She shushes it.

_Not the danger. Not the risk. The information._

“Well, I suppose if it’s vital information...” comes the reply after what feels like an eternity. The bemusement and humour is still there, now with a slight undercurrent of concern. “...but first, shouldn’t you have someone with you, young man?”

 _And there’s my cue_.

She pushes herself forwards off of the tree trunk, opening her eyes and spinning around it as she goes. Rather than pushing the panic down, she lets a little of it leak upwards, lets it show on her face, in her voice.

 _“_ Bart!” she calls, running forwards across the grass, every bit the picture of a worried guardian who’s child ran off on them.

He turns to face her direction immediately, the woman he had been talking to turning as well.

She’s old but not that old - most likely about the same age as Iris herself, maybe a little older. Her hair is going grey at the roots and she has crow’s feet, but there’s a twinkle in her eyes and a softness to her smile. All-in-all, she looks exactly like the sort of adult that a child separated from a caretaker would approach, which is exactly why Iris chose her for this.

“Don’t run off like that, Bart!” she says, having reached them. She puts her hands on his shoulders, looks him in the eyes. “Don’t _scare_ me like that!”

“But Grandma-” he starts to protest, a twinkle in his eyes that belies the fact that he knows exactly what they’re doing and is enjoying himself.

“No buts!” she says, pulling him in for a hug. “ _Don’t_ do that again,”

Bart makes a sound that could either be a mumbled affirmative or muffled laughter. Iris knows it’s the latter but hopes their target will think it is the former.

“Thank you for finding him,” she says, looking up and smiling as Bart pulls away from the hug.

“He found me, to be honest,” the woman says, smiling in return.

Iris sees her eyes flicker between Bart’s clothes and hers, knows there is curiosity there.

“A costume party at his cousin’s,” Iris says, answering the unspoken question. She puts her hands on his shoulders. “He’s a character from some tv show about space travel and aliens, though I couldn’t pretend to know anything about it. I’m supposed to be helping chaperone when we get there but...”

Here she gives a slightly sheepish laugh, ducks her head a little bit. Part acting, part use of experience from similar events with Dawn and Don to the one she is making up now.

“Well, we’re from out of town,” she says “and I’m afraid I got us a fair bit turned around on our way. Bart’s cousin, my nephew, he lives down near one of the libraries here...now which one was it...”

She knows the look of a face when a story has been bought and represses the small victorious smile that wants to make its way onto her face.

“The Wieringo-Waid Library? That’s the closest to here,” their target says, unknowingly giving exactly the information they were fishing for.

“That’s the one,” Iris says, giving a happy grin only partially pretended. “Could you maybe give us some directions?”

She is told that _yes, of course_ and in a few moments she has all of the information she needs. She smiles, says _thank you_ , and starts walking, her hands moving from Bart’s shoulders to having just one holding his hand.

Only a few seconds after they start walking away, Bart tugs out of her hold, dashes back – and Iris allows herself a moment of pride for him at going at a normal human speed with no superspeed in sight – and asks a question. He gets a laugh and then an answer and then dashes back over to her and slips his hand into hers again.

“I know the day and year now,” he declares, grinning a familiar mischievous grin that she is far more used to seeing on his aunt’s face than his.

She ruffles his hair and they keep walking.

As soon as they are out of sight of the woman they got their information from, Iris silently holds out a hand and Bart high fives her enthusiastically.

“That was _awesome,”_ he exclaims, smiling up at her.

For the briefest moment, she sees red hair and green eyes and a different face, telling her the same thing after a similar situation. Then she blinks and it is gone. She smiles back at her grandson and reminds the part of her that is hurting a little that they will see Wally again soon enough.

“Yes, it was,” she says. “Now come on, sweetheart, we’ve got a library to get to so we can find that cousin of yours,”

Even now, she’s achingly aware that the time they have ticks away with every heartbeat.

* * *

The walk to the library is thankfully quite short. The day and year that Bart cheerfully informed her of mean that they are in roughly the right era, and everything Iris sees on the walk there – atmosphere and attitude among people, level of technology, level of _nature_ \- confirms this.

It’s a little odd, truth be told, seeing so _little_ technology as compared to the 30 th century and so _much_ as compared to the years she spent in her adoptive era. A sort of middle ground, though tending much more towards the latter than the former.

When they reach the library building, Iris wastes no time getting them both inside and onto one of the computers. The machine is achingly, _achingly_ slow and the fledgling internet which it connects to is almost even more so, but she is just grateful that it _exists._ Things would have been much harder if they had landed far enough back that such technology did not exist – unless, of course, they had landed in the time and place she had planned them to, in which case this would not be necessary at all.

That aside, Iris is just grateful that the computer and the internet _exist_ , and so is capable of putting up with the slowness of them both.

Bart... not so much.

“I’m booorreeeed,” he mutters, slouching in the chair next to her like any average pre-teen. “This is _boring,”_

The computer is snails’ pace for Iris. She can only imagine how slow it is to him.

“Why don’t you have a look through some books, sweetheart?” she suggests “you can go through those as quickly as you like,”

She realises her mistake almost as soon as she says it. Even having already raised two speedsters, fumbles are still very much a possibility.

Before she can even get out so much as the _beginning_ of a word to correct herself, Bart vanishes with a crackle of lightning and then reappears with a pile of books next to the seat and flipping through one in his lap so quickly she would be half afraid it would set alight from the friction if she didn’t know about a speedster’s natural friction proof aura.

She has just begun to open her mouth to warn him off using his speed, her heart _hammering_ in her chest at the thought of the damage it could do, when Bart suddenly yelps and drops the book.

“ _It **bit** me!”_ he exclaims, staring at his thumb and slipping back into Interlac.

It takes her just a moment to realise what must have happened, and then she has to try and suppress a smile.

“Let me see, sweetheart,” she says, holding out her hand.

Bart puts his hand in hers and she makes a show of examining it closely. As she expected, there is a slight slit in the skin of his thumb that will most likely be gone in the next few seconds.

“It’s just a papercut,” she says, letting go of his hand “That happens with paper, sometimes. It’ll sting a lot, but it’ll heal quickly,”

Bart eyes the book he dropped on the floor with distrust.

“I... don’t think I like paper very much,” he says, almost sounding petulant.

This time Iris doesn’t bother suppressing the smile and even allows herself a chuckle.

“I’m afraid that’s tough luck then, sweetheart, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it in this era,” she says, ruffling his hair.

Bart sighs, but picks the book up off of the floor again. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, and then starts flipping through the pages at an almost human speed, just on the edges of using his speed.

Iris goes back to her searching, just beginning to grow worried at the results she’s seeing, when he speaks again.

“Grandma?”

“Yes, Bart?” she answers, eyes still on the screen.

“...what am I looking for?”

“Just any information that might be helpful for us. Things about your cousin, or your grandfather, or the Justice League,”

“...how?”

She pauses at that and turns to face him. Bart has the book he had before still open in his lap and his face is a picture of genuine confusion, brow furrowed and eyes wide.

The era they came here from, the only one Bart has ever known, has a lot of technology, so she understands his lack of knowledge about paper books, but information is far from lacking and he should know how to find it regardless of medium. Maybe he would have a bit of a tricky time with English because he is used to Interlac, but the ability to find information is something any child would learn or be taught.

Except...

Except Bart isn’t “any child”. He has never known another child, never been to any form of school, lived his entire life inside a computer simulation.

Something clicks inside her mind.

“Bart, sweetheart,” she says, reaching forwards to put a hand on his. “Did you ever learn how to read?”

His brow furrows a bit more in thought, and then-

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Never did, never needed to,”

And then he looks a little worried.

“That’s okay, sweetheart,” she says, smiling reassuringly “We can make sure you learn how later, and how to write as well. For now, why don’t you just look through the pictures in the books and see what you can find?”

He bites his lip, and then smiles and nods.

“Yeah, okay!” he says “I can do that!”

He picks up another book and starts flipping through it, and Iris goes back to the online searching that is beginning to set her on edge.

* * *

Nothing. There’s _nothing_. Nothing about the Flash, anywhere at all that she can find. Not even the old comics about Jay exist. Nothing about the Justice Society. Nothing even about _Superman_ or any other member of the League, save Batman. And even then, Batman is still only rumours.

There are also some vague things she found that _might_ be Wonder Woman during World War One, but even then...

Her heart feels like it has sunk to the bottom of her gut. This is very, very bad.

Batman will grow to be more known, and eventually Robin will come along. One day Diana will return. The other Leaguers will show up too.

But none of that helps them _now._

The worry and the panic is just beginning to set in when Bart’s voice pulls her out of her thoughts.

“Grandma?”

And, oh goodness, he sounds _worried._

“Yes, Bart?” she says, careful to keep the emotions whirling inside of her from leaking into her voice as she turns to face him.

“I’m... I haven’t healed,” he says, holding out his thumb.

And indeed he hasn’t. The slit on his thumb from the papercut is still there. That shouldn’t be _possible_.

She thinks about the lightning that has been showing up every time he uses his speed since they landed here. She knows that speedsters generate lightning, but now that she thinks about it, it’s almost never _that_ visible or _that_ much at the speeds Bart has been going. She thinks about the fact that he _has_ used his speed since they got here and yet... doesn’t appear to have aged a day.

She feels a little kindling of hope lighten the weight in her gut.

Maybe... just _maybe..._

“Grandma?”

She lets herself smile, puts her hands on Bart’s shoulders.

“That’s okay, Bart, that’s... that’s okay,”

She thinks about everything she has even vaguely learned about the multiverse, wonders if it’s possible.

“Are you sure?”

Maybe it is. Everything seems to say they’ve landed somewhere where she can’t find him the cure he needs, but maybe, just _maybe_... maybe here he doesn’t _need_ a cure.

Perhaps, in this universe, this universe as yet without the kinds of heroes she knows, the speed force is disrupted, even... blocked, slightly?

More visible lightning, from more effort needed to connect with it. And no healing factor.

No healing factor... and no accelerated aging.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she says, her grip tightening just a fraction “Yes, I’m sure,”

And then she pulls him towards her, moves forwards herself, and wraps him in the tightest hug she can. He hesitates only a fraction of a second before tightly squeezing her back.

There’s no Justice League here. No Flash of any kind.

Quite simply, there is not _help_ for them. None that she can find.

But that’s okay. That’s _difficult_ and _unpleasant_ but it’s _okay._ Because if she’s right, Bart doesn’t need a cure here. So he’ll be okay. And if he’s okay, this whole situation is okay.

All she needs to do is build them a life. She needs to be strong enough for both of them, and she needs to build them a life.

She can do that. She can be strong enough. She can do that.

She has to be able to do that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *vibrates in excitement* I am actually so hyped to finally, _finally_ be posting this fic. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


	2. The Middle

Building a life for yourself in a new dimension, a dimension where you have no form of presence at all and thus no help that you can get from _anyone_ , is no easy task.

It’s a monumentally difficult task, honestly. Especially when you have a twelve year old speedster to provide for.

Iris West-Allen is no stranger to monumentally difficult tasks.

And aside from that...

...the thing about skill sets is that they are frequently more flexible than one at first believes.

For example, if one spends their life honing the skills of an investigative journalist, learns such things as the make-up and flaws of a fake ID well enough to spot one, learns how to spot discrepancies in financial records and trace them back to the source, learns how to unveil secrets and reveal mysteries no matter how well hidden they are, then one can – with a fair amount of ease – turn these skills around to _create_ the very things one has learned how to pick apart.

For another example, if one spends one’s entire life in simulation after simulation, living ten, a hundred, a thousand scenarios and possibilities and lives, one picks up a wide variety of skills in dealing with every one of those situations. Perhaps one would not have the strongest sense of what, exactly, reality is outside of these fantasies, but that does not negate the sort of tricks that one learns – especially not in regards to the sorts of skills with technology that you’d build up _living_ in it.

And if you were to, hypothetically, put these skill sets together, well...

...really, adding superspeed to the equation makes it seem almost unfair.

* * *

They’re a good team, Bart and she. A good, fluid, almost seamless team. She sees a lot of his namesake in him, but in these times where they work together to build identities and lives for themselves, she sees a lot of herself too. Herself, and his mother.

The first few months involve a lot more theft – largely of food – than she’d like, but she keeps a list of places to pay back when they have the means to ease her conscience.

When all is said and done, this is how things stand: she is Iris Allen, wife of Bartholomew Allen, who is deceased. His cause of death was old age and he went in his sleep. They had a son together. Their son got married and had a son of his own. He and his wife were victims on a plane crash, leaving her the sole guardian of currently twelve year old Bart. They have recently moved to a small, two-bedroom bungalow in Central City. Bart is home-schooled.

It isn’t a perfect story, and neither of them are happy about the family they had to leave out of it, but it should hopefully hold up to any scrutiny but the Bat’s.

And, hopefully, by the time that their story is being scrutinised by the Bat, it will be his usual background checks on his friends, not because they have pulled his attention to themselves in the wrong way.

So, they have lives for themselves built now.

What do you do once you build yourself a life?

With any luck, you start living it.

* * *

There is a single thing that forms the biggest obstacle to that goal. A thing that by now Iris knows runs in the blood.

Oh there are the everyday issues to tackle, like money to pay for the things they need to live, like food and water, integrating into an unfamiliar neighbourhood (and adjusting to a new timeline and dimension), the upcoming issue of balancing being the single parent of a speedster with having a job, figuring out how she’s going to get back into journalism... but those are all just everyday issues, things that can be handled, things that they can ask for help with.

For now, she’s not working - she doesn’t want to leave Bart alone yet. Once she teaches him to read, helping him catch up to the level of knowledge that he’ll need for school won’t be too hard, and then they can get him enrolled. _Then_ , she can get a job.

Until then, they have an alternate source of income.

(It’s a simple system, really. In the time period they’ve landed in, technology is still up and coming. And even without that, she has decades of experience in investigative journalism. Tracking down corrupt businesspeople and their ilk is a simple job. She skims what they need as discreetly as possible, anonymously sends the names and details of the ones who have done things that will actually get them incriminated to as many people as possible, and keeps a list of the ones who haven’t slipped up enough yet)

None of those things are their biggest obstacle. That is something completely different.

“And _where_ do you think _you’re_ going?” she asks, leaning against the doorframe of the living room and raising an eyebrow.

Bart _freezes._

“Nowhere!” he blurts, turning around. The crackle of lightning that arcs out from his fingers to strike the wall gives away the fact that he used his superspeed to pull the bandana he’s been wearing as a mask off. He winces and looks at her sheepishly from under the hood of the scarlet hoodie he’s wearing.

Iris ignores the burn mark now on the wall – it’s only one of hundreds of its kinda around the house anyways. Eventually they’ll have to paint over them or something, but that’s best left until Bart has his lightning problem under control (or they have regular guests. Or guests of any kind.)

“You know,” she says, voice deceptively casual “It’s usually _bats_ that are out this late. Flashes usually stick to the daylight,”

Bart glances at the clock _tickticktick_ ing away in the corner and winces again.

“I thought you’d be asleep,” he mumbles.

“Yeah, nope,” she says, pushing off of the wall and walking over to grab him by the shoulders. She turns him around and frog marches him down the hallway. “Back to bed with you, mister,”

“But Grandmaaaaaa...” he whines, tilting his head right back and giving her puppy dog eyes. “I wanna help peeeoopleeee,”

“And you will,” she says “Just not in a hoodie and a bandana mask at two thirty am when you’re twelve years old. Wait for Superman, kiddo, that’s the rules,”

“You _always_ say that,” Bart huffs, crossing his arms and pouting.

“Because _you_ keep trying to sneak out and be a superhero when you’ve been told not to,” she replies. She can feel the exhaustion of having stayed awake waiting for him to try to sneak out tug at the back of her mind and suppresses a yawn.

“ _Wouldn’t have to sneak out if you’d just **let** me,_” Bart mumbles, using Interlac as he has gotten into the habit of doing when he’s annoyed.

She just raises an eyebrow and he sighs.

“I know, I know, wait for Superman,” he says, rolling his eyes.

The he wraps his arms around her waist, mumbles a _“good night”_ into the hug, and goes back to bed.

She happily retreats to her own.

* * *

“Wait for Superman,” she tells him. “Just wait for Superman, and then you can be the Flash,”

She doesn’t remember what it was like when metahumans first started emerging in the world. That happened before she was born, with people like Jay Garrick and Alan Scott, with the Justice Society and World War Two.

She _does_ remember when Superman first appeared. She remembers how things changed when he did, how more and more heroes started stepping up and out, how the idea of people having powers started to become a bit more normalised.

Superman was the trailblazer. She’s certain that he will be here too.

So she tells Bart to wait, to wait for Superman and _then_ he can go out as a hero.

She doesn’t really tell Bart _why_ he has to wait for Superman, and maybe that’s unfair of her. But how can she tell him it’s because after Superman has shown up it will be _safer_ for him to be a hero, it’s because by the time this world’s Superman arrives, Bart will be at least a little _older_?

(How can she tell him that really, underneath it all, she’s making him wait for Superman because she’s _scared?_ Scared of losing him, like she lost his father and his aunt and his grandfather? Like they have both now lost their entire world and all the things and people they ever knew?

She can’t tell him that she’s scared. She’s the adult here and the only family he has. She _needs_ to be strong for him and while he’s this young that means not letting him know that she’s scared. Maybe she’ll tell him when he’s older, maybe never)

Bart doesn’t _want_ to wait for Superman. He wants to get out and fight crime and save people and run and run and _run_.

He comes up with a lot of ways to makes disguises from his everyday clothes, though he does seem to favour the hoodie and bandana combination. His attempts to sneak out never _fully_ stop, but they go from every other night to once a week to once a month to once every few months. She’ll take what progress she can get.

She’s known from the beginning that all she can do is stall him, never stop him. He’s got too much of Barry in him for that. Too much of her too.

* * *

Their second biggest challenge is the adventure of Bart learning how to read.

One of the advantages of being a speedster is the capability to learn almost any skill in a ludicrously short space of time. With a mind that can move faster than sound, you could learn a new language in the space of seconds, learn how to play an instrument like a professional in the space of one song, learn how to build and then actually build a building in a matter of minutes.

There’s one slight caveat that comes with this particular gift of superspeed, however – you need to either be able to teach yourself through books and/or trial and error, or you need a teacher who is a fellow speedster. 

Otherwise, you need to learn things the old fashioned way.

That is, _slowly._

Bart, needless to say, finds this very, very tedious.

To be fair, Iris does as well.

But they stick at it. However tedious it is, Bart _does_ want to know how to read.

And anyways, they’re both too stubborn to even imagine giving up.

(It’s much easier to stick to a task when you choose to see it as a challenge, rather than a chore.

It’s a trick that she picked up with Wally and then carried on to Dawn and Don (and now to Bart). Making something a challenge or an _adventure_ or a mission, rather than a task or a chore, usually helps with feeling motivated to do it. She’s used it for herself a few times.)

* * *

Bart was always going to be a child raised on stories. Stories of the heroes of old, of the Flash throughout the age, of the Justice Society and the Justice League, of his Grandfather most of all. And in a world where there is no other speedster to help him learn to read and write in a single morning before school, these stories are joined by others like _The Magic Treehouse_ and _Apple Tree Farm_ and lots and lots of _Dr Seuss._

Bart likes Dr Seuss quite a lot.

“It reminds me of before,” he says, quietly, softly, one night while they’re sitting on the couch, tracing a finger across the words _I've worried about it with all of my heart. But now, says the Once-ler, now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear_ with his voice just a little bit tight “The pictures and the words remind me a lot of the VR,”

He continues to hold that same sort of composure for a few more seconds, before tears start dripping down his face, a few splashing onto the pages of the book. Iris sets it down on her knees and lifts her arms, letting Bart slide halfway into her lap, burying his head in her shoulder while his shake.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she says, running a hand through his hair. “It’s okay,”

“ _I miss Dox, Grandma_ ,” he all but whispers, falling back into Interlac.

 _“I know, Bart, I know,”_ she replies, hardly going to deny him the comfort of his mother tongue “ _And that’s okay. It’s okay to miss him,”_

He sobs harder and she pulls him closer, murmuring reassurances and comfort, and the book falls from her knees to thud against the floor.

Later, when she picks it up, she carefully ignores the tear stains across and surrounding the words **_unless_** _someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not_ and closes it, slipping it back into place on the bookshelf.

They don’t read that book again for a while.

* * *

The first book that Bart reads through completely on his own, beginning to end and everything in-between, is _Oh, The Places You’ll Go._

She asks him which book he wants to use tonight, he tells her, and she picks it out from the bookcase and joins him to sit on the couch, as they have been doing since he started learning.

Then he closes his fingers around it and gently tugs it from her grasp.

“I’m gonna do it today,” he says, face set in determination “I’m gonna do it today on my _own_ ,”

She smiles and sits back and lets him. There are a few points where he stumbles or pauses but he carries on, loudly and happily through _And then things start to happen, don't worry. Don't stew. Just go right along. You'll start happening too,_ quieter and almost sombrely through _All Alone! Whether you like it or not, alone will be something you'll be quite a lot,_ satisfied and confident as he finishes with _Your mountain is waiting. So...get on your way!_

He closes the book and then looks up at her and she grins, ruffles his hair, and pulls him in for a hug.

“That was _wonderful,_ sweetheart,” she tells him.

He grins back and wriggles out of the hug. He dashes over to the bookcase and then back to her, dropping _Bartholomew and the Oobleck_ into her lap.

“Let’s do this one next,” he says, looking very eager.

(He has read through every book on the bookcase on his own within the week.

_Speedsters._

Once they get the hang of something, they’re their own best teacher)

* * *

“Bart!” she calls down the hallway “have you been using superspeed inside the house _again?”_

“N- _maybe!”_ he yells back from his bedroom.

“Maybe, _certainly!”_ she replies “You’ve scorched the wall again!”

“My responsibility to paint over it this time then?”

“Yes!”

“Okay!”

“ _Before_ dinner, Bart!”

“Okay!”

A pause and then-

“When’s dinner?”

“Two hours!”

“Okay!”

* * *

Of the two of them, she’s the one who is infinitely more nervous on Bart’s first day of school.

She _knows_ that he is more than competent in reading and writing. She knows that he has all the knowledge he needs to know in preparation for all the subjects. She knows he doesn’t necessarily have the knowledge of how to navigate the social situations but she also knows that he’s bright, observant when he cares to be, and that he’ll never learn about those social situations without living them.

She knows that he’s _ready._ He’s _thirteen_ now, he can handle school.

But nonetheless, there are a thousand “ _what if?”_ scenarios where everything could wrong running through her mind, anything and everything from _what if he gets lost?_ to _what if he gets bullied?_ to _what if_ _his powers get exposed?_

Bart is just grinning and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, excited about school in the way that someone who has never experience real school before often is. He probably won’t retain that excitement for school for long, as he settles into the schedule and structure of it and encounters things like essays and tests, but she hopes he never loses that excitement for _learning._

Her heart is going a mile a minute as she walks down the driveway with him, as she makes sure he’s wearing his coloured contacts (and those were an _adventure_ to get their hands on), he has his bag, all his books, his pencil case, his lunch...

And then he’s smiling and hugging her and getting on the bus and away to his first day of school.

The worry doesn’t go away until that afternoon, when he hops off the bus still grinning and proceeds to spend the next half hour excitedly talking about the people he met and the things he learned. He even only spends about ten minutes of that complaining about how _slow_ school is and how boring the structure of it is.

The worry in her heart ebbs away and she smiles and ruffles his hair.

(It isn’t long before she turns out to be right in her predictions of Bart’s school excitement not lasting long though. By the second Wednesday she has to grab him under the arms and physically haul him to the bus just to get him to get on it)

* * *

Once Bart is off to school, she starts getting into work again.

Breaking into journalism in this new world will probably be a pain, but she can think of no other career she’d rather do, no matter how difficult it will be to get (back) into the industry.

* * *

Of all the things that she could hypothetically regret about sending Bart to school, she did not think it would be something like _this._

“Bart,” she says, taking in the sight of her thirteen-going-on-fourteen year old grandson standing on the doorstep, with a very different hair colour to the one that he left the house with, grinning wildly while the car that dropped him home drives off “what did you _do?”_

“Technically I wasn’t the one that did it,” he answers, pulling his bag inside when she steps aside to let him in.

“ _Technically,”_ she responds, shutting the door behind her and following him through to the living room. “you are still responsible for it, even if you weren’t the one to do it,”

He hums in a non-committal way and ducks into the kitchen.

“Is it permanent?” she asks.

“Yep,” he replies cheerily, strolling back through the doorway with an already half-eaten apple in hand “Completely, totally permanent,”

“Well,” she says, putting a hand on her chin and smiling wryly “I suppose it will make it easier to spot you when you try to sneak out,”

He freezes and then pulls a lock of hair as scarlet as his grandfather’s suit into his line of vision.

And then he throws back his head and _groans._

* * *

A month later, he walks in the door with pitch black hair and the biggest, smuggest grin on his face.

She rolls her eyes and laughs.

* * *

 

Bart is grinning when she walks into the kitchen, his hair wildly flyaway and messy and a massive grin on his face that she just _knows_ means he’s done something that she isn’t going to approve of. She decides to ignore it until she’s had her coffee and walks over to the coffee machine.

Bart zips over to her side and grins widely. He waits until she has a warm mug in her hands, and then opens his mouth.

“Morning, Grandma!” he says, his voice approximately somewhere down around the equator.

She stares at him and blinks slowly. Her first thought is _Puberty?_ She tries to remember if she’s ever met anyone on her (biological) side of the family or Barry’s with a voice that deep. Don didn’t start puberty until fifteen but that doesn’t mean Bart couldn’t start at fourteen – but even with Don having superspeed, his voice breaking took longer than overnight, which seems to have happened to Bart if that’s what this is.

 Then she looks down at her coffee and back up to her grandson.

“Bart,” she starts, brow furrowing somewhat in confusion because this is _not_ something she wants to deal with before coffee “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“I inhaled sulphur hexafluoride!” he announces proudly, voice still approximately residing in Antarctica.

Well then.

“You’re hanging upside down off of your bed until all that gas is out of your lungs, mister,” she says, voice flat. She doesn’t even want to think about where he got his hands on sulphur hexafluoride. She’ll ask later. After coffee.

Bart sighs, hangs his head, turns around and walks out of the room. After a moment she hears a _thudthudthud_ up the stairs and then a loud _thwump_ from his bedroom above the kitchen.

Then she takes a sip of her coffee and starts mentally planning for puberty. She’d almost forgotten about that.

* * *

Later, she does remember to ask him where he got sulphur hexafluoride.

“Broke into the school science lab. The older kids were talking about this demo they had involving different gases or something and sulphur hexafluoride was involved so I knew the school had it and I wanted to see what my voice would sound like so,” he replies, all in one breath, and then shrugs.

“You didn’t use your speed in that endeavour, did you?” she asks

“ _Grandma,”_ he gasps, as though he’s offended and scandalised at the mere suggestions he’d generate lightning around and/or in a room full of various chemical substances.

“Just checking,”

* * *

“Can I come help?” Bart asks, kicking his legs beneath his chair.

“No,” she replies, buttoning up her coat.

“But I wanna,” he says, leaning forwards across the table.

“You have homework to do,” she reminds him, picking up her notebook and pen.

“But it’s not due tomorrow or anything!”  he protests, pulling out the puppy dog eyes.

“Do your homework, Bart,”

“But I want to help,” he whines, clambering out of his chair to follow her to the door.

“I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive, sweetheart. I can handle doing an investigation on my own while you do your maths homework,”

“But-”

 _“Homework,”_ she says, ending the discussion.

She kisses him on the forehead and then opens the door.

“Love you, sweetheart,” she says.

“Love you too,” he replies, grumpy but no less sincere.

* * *

By and large, the lightning hadn’t really been too big a problem.

Yes, it scorched the walls and the floors and the ceilings and pretty much everything in the entire house, but it wasn’t really an active _problem_. At first, she started cleaning off or painting over scorch marks herself, and then she made Bart do it. If he scorched something, he cleaned it. It turned out to be a fairly effective method to get him to limit superspeed usage in the house.

The most memorable of all the scorch marks had probably been the person shaped one from when he accidentally vibrated through a wall. They’d worked together on covering up that one.

Now, unfortunately, it’s a little less manageable.

“I didn’t mean to blow the fuses out,” Bart says, his voice muffled by the fact that he has his face buried in his knees, which he’s hugging to his chest. “I really didn’t mean to,”

“I know, sweetheart,” she says, rubbing slow circles on his back. “It’s not a big deal, Bart. We fixed them, no damage done,”

“It’s em _barassing_!” he complains, the parts of his face not hidden by legs or hair visibly turning red when his voice cracks halfway through the word.

“The lightning or your voice breaking?” she asks.

“B _oth!”_

“Well, I don’t know about the lightning, since you’re the first speedster to grow up in this dimension, but I can tell you that your voice breaking is perfectly normal and you don’t need to be embarassed about it,”

Bart just groans into his knees.

She keeps rubbing circles and tries to think of something to cheer him up.

“...want to hear about how your cousin Wally reacted to _his_ voice breaking?” she asks.

“...okay,” Bart replies, looking up.

He’s laughing in three minutes.

* * *

It takes a month for Bart’s voice to settle. The lightning fluctuations settle at around the same time. He still produces far more every time he runs than he did before, however.

(“I got more lightning to match a deeper voice,” he says in a tone of consideration over the kitchen table one morning several more months afterwards “Do you think I would’ve produced more lightning if I’d used my speed back when I inhaled that sulphur hexafluoride?”

“I don’t know and you are _not_ testing that theory,” she responds, not looking up from the papers she’s going over.

“Spoilsport,” he mutters into a glass of orange juice.)

* * *

Life goes by and goes on, sometimes feeling slow, sometimes whizzing by.

Life is, as it always is, a series and process of events. Bart learns how to ride a bike. Iris gets herself established into the journalism industry. They both make and lose friends as years go by. Bart goes through sixteen different hair colours. Iris briefly meets Lois Lane (and muses on how odd it feels to now be older than someone who was older than her back home). They both start to feel a bit impatient waiting for Superman to show up.

And then, he finally, finally does.

Iris had never thought that Superman’s arrival into the public eye could be a case of _careful what you wish for._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An alternate title for this chapter could be "Iris Is An Epic Single Parent" but everybody knows that already and it'd break the pattern if I actually called the chapter that.


	3. (Not Quite) The End

They're in Metropolis the day it happens.

There's a Kryptonian ship in the sky, the ground shakes and starts to tear itself apart, in the distance they can hear and see explosions and buildings begin to fall, crumbling and torn apart alike.

The people around them start to panic and scream and run away.

She grabs Bart's arm at the same moment that he turns back to look at her.

 _"Go,"_ she tells him.

He almost startles at her open, public use of Interlac, something she has always kept strictly private. Then he properly processes what she said and realises that she, for the first time since they arrived here, just gave him  _permission_.  
His eyes steel and his jaw tightens and for the briefest moment she sees Barry's face just before he suits up and runs off to fight the latest world ending catastrophe. Then Bart meets her eyes and nods, once, tightly.

Then he turns towards the crumbling buildings and the screams, turns towards the people who need saving, and vanishes in a flash of lightning.

And though she may be a lot slower than him, she's running that way too.

Barry's not the only one that Bart inherited heroic tendencies from.

* * *

Everything after that seems like a blur. When she looks back on it, she'll be able to remember what she sees and hears clearly - she's spent too many years as a reporter  _not_ to be able to take notice of and catalogue the things around her - but living it is another matter entirely.

She sees lightning out of the corners of her eyes every so often, a blur moving in and out of buildings, evacuating adults one or two at a time, children three or four. A few times she sees him pull people out of the way of falling debris between zipping in and out of each building.

There are a few people that she pulls out of the way of debris herself, but mostly she yells warnings, helps people to their feet, directs people the way they need to go to get further away from the fight and to safety.

She doesn't know how long the battle and their efforts last until long after it's over. In the moment, every second feels like an eternity.

When the ground stops shaking, the buildings stop falling, the sound starts to quieten, she looks for Bart.

There's a part of her on the inside that is screaming. That is railing and the world and questioning everything and asking over, and over, and over again, to the pulse of her heartbeat  _Is this what I've been making him wait for all these years?  
_ She told him to wait for Superman. She told him Superman would be the  _trailblazer._ Would be the best example of those with superpowers, would make it  _safer_ for Bart and any other metahumans that may be hiding on this Earth to step out and help people.

She'd thought this Earth was just like the one they came from, maybe just a bit behind in its superheroes arriving. She was wrong. She knows now that she was  _so very wrong_ about this Earth and she thinks that maybe that truth has been showed to her in the worst way possible.

Her view of this world has been  _shattered_  irrevocably, and a part of her just wants to scream and cry and ask  _why? Why is this Earth so different? Why couldn't she have seen it sooner?_

But somewhere in this city, this wrecked and hurting city, is her grandson. She doesn't know where he is, doesn't know  _how_ he is. She's always told him more stories about his grandfather than the Superman of back home, but she's told him  _enough_ about their world's Clark Kent that she knows this will be hitting him hard too.

So she pushes the hurt and panic and worry and stinging  _betrayal_ she feels deep down and looks for her grandson.

(Maybe the betrayal isn't fair. She doesn't know this Superman, this Clark Kent. She doesn't know anything about him or who he is as a person or what he's gone through. She doesn't even know if his name  _is_ Clark Kent in this world. Is it fair to feel betrayed by a total stranger because they don't match your memories of who their counterpart in an alternate dimension is? She doesn't think that's fair to him. It doesn't make the feeling go away though)

She finds Bart, head bowed, shoulders shaking, hands clenched into fists, kneeling by the wreckage of an office building.

He hears her approaching and she can see his shoulders tense, then relax, and then shake more. He knows her footsteps, has them memorised. It's a skill that he learned by accident, just listening for her walking down the hallway the nights he tried to sneak out and go superheroing.

"There were still people inside," he says, his voice quiet and strained and thick with tears. "There were still people inside and  _I wasn't fast enough to get any of them out,"_

She kneels down beside him, puts a hand on his back, between his shoulder blades. He's still shaking and she can see some of it is tears, but some of it is the sheer amount of  _energy_ he has burned, using his speed so full out.

"Bart," she says, softly. He's taller than her now, but he's so curled in on himself that even though she's kneeling at equal level to him, she seems to be the taller one. "You did everything that you could. You saved a  _lot_ of people today,"

"But I didn't save any of  _them,"_ he whispers "The building was just starting to fall when I saw it and if I'd just been  _faster_ I could've got here in time and got them all out,"

His shaking gets worse and she starts rubbing circles on his back, the way she used to when he was little. She feels that stinging betrayal again, feels angry that of all the things it could have been, Bart's first experience as a superhero is  _this._

(She's not sure who it is she's angry at. Herself, maybe, for making him wait so long that this was his first experience. Maybe this world's Superman, for this being his first appearance in public.

 _I'm not perfect_  she hears a voice of a ghost of the past say in the back of her mind. She'd never known Clark particularly _well_  but she had known him and it's most certainly his voice she's remembering right now. She can't remember when he said it but she remembers him saying it.

 _Even the best of men make mistakes, Iris_  she hears her father's voice say.

 _This is awfully big for a mistake_  she snaps back at the spectre)

She pulls her rucksack off of her back and pulls out the plastic bottle inside of it. They've both taken to carrying one or something like it in case of emergency.

"Bart," she says, putting a hand on his shoulder. And then " _Bart, sweetheart,"_ in Interlac.

He doesn't raise his head but he does turn it to look at her. She holds the bottle out to him.

He sighs, and then takes it, twists the lid off, and starts downing it in large, deep gulps.

Usually, he wouldn't have even touched it without some complaint or joke about how awful it tastes. That he has just taken and drunk it without complaint feels like a confirmation of just how bad this is.

He drops the emptied bottle from his fingers. It makes a hollow  _donk_ against the concrete beneath them.

And then his face twists in disgust and he wipes at his mouth.

" _Yeuch,"_ he says, shuddering "That stuff is  _so_   _gross,"_

She smiles a little at that and nods as she picks up the bottle, sticks it back into her bag. She pulls out a bag of nuts.

"I know, sweetheart," she says, patting his shoulder sympathetically before handing the bag to him "but it's a quick source of calories when you need them,"

"Couldn't we do it with something like peanut butter or something though?" he says, just holding the bag in his hand and making no effort to eat, leaning sideways and resting his cheek against her shoulder, falling easily into the distraction of a familiar debate that is more of a joke at this point. "Why  _olive oil?"_

"Eight hundred and eighty four calories to the hundred grams, kiddo," she says, wrapping and arm around him in the closest thing to a hug that they can achieve without moving. "Nine hundred and ten calories to a one liter bottle. That's eight thousand and forty four calories in one bottle. A lot of calories for you, very quickly,"

"You said said eight thousand and forty four  _point four_ last time," he mumbles.

"Sorry for forgetting the decimal place," she replies.

He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, but she knows he isn't asleep.

"It's going to be okay, sweetheart," she says, the same way she did years ago when he cried about missing Dox "it's going to be okay,"

* * *

After Metropolis, Bart starts doing more to train himself.

He'd been doing plenty before - practiced his running when he could, tested his powers. He'd been attending a self-defence class to learn hand-to-hand since he was eighteen. Not to mention the sheer amount of things he'd  _read._ At this point, he'd probably read the contents of an entire library.

But after Metropolis, there is a sharp, noticeable increase. He's out of the house more and he comes home later. He's eating extra, even for a speedster. A few times she finds him passed out on the couch, muttering about proper running form in his sleep.

She's not surprised that he's pushing himself like this. Metropolis hit them both hard and they're both coping in their own ways. She does what she can to support him, tries to help him to pull back even just a little so that he doesn't burn himself out.

It isn't until the day the doorbell rings and she answers it because Bart has, for the first time in eight months, slept passed nine am, that she discovers how  _exactly_ Metropolis affected him.

* * *

"Hi! Uh, is Barry home?"

This is a question that she hasn't been asked for several decades so it takes her a moment to process it.

"Pardon?" she asks, just to make sure she heard correctly.

The boy - well, man, more accurately, probably, he looks about Bart's age and for all that he's young, Bart is still technically an  _adult_ \- shuffles his feet and looks a little nervous. He's holding a scrap of paper in his hand and seems to be checking an address written on it.

She only catches sight of it for a moment but she recognises Bart's handwriting.

"Uh, Barry. Is Barry home?" he asks "I'm Reese, we're, uh, we're in a parkour group together? He didn't show up this morning, so I came to check if he's okay. Do I, uh, do I have the right house?"

Well then.

"Yes, you do," she replies, smiling reassuringly to try and put him at ease "Sorry, my grandson has gone by 'Bart' for most of his life. I forget sometimes that he goes by Barry now,"

 _Or, rather, I didn't know at all_ she thinks, wondering why he never told her, why he started, how long ago he made the change (after Metropolis, it must have been after Metropolis)

"Oh!" Reese says, looking relieved "So, uh, is he home? He's okay, right?"

"He's fine," she says "Still in bed, actually, slept straight through his alarms," here, she lets a little of the worry she's been feeling slip into her expression "He's been pushing himself an awful lot lately, so I didn't wake him, since I think he needs the sleep. I didn't know he had plans to be anywhere specific today,"

"No, no, that's fine," Reese says, waving his hands "I was just a bit worried and wanted to make sure he was okay! That he wasn't sick or hurt or anything. I'm glad he's okay. We'd all noticed that he seemed more tired than usual recently so it's good he's getting sleep!"

"I'll let him know that you came by when he wakes up, if that's alright with you,"

"Yeah, of course! Okay, I'll, uh, I'll just go now. It was nice to meet you, Mrs Al-" he cuts himself off and looks torn between apologising and asking a question.

"Mrs Allen," she confirms, nodding "I'm Bart-  _Barry_ 's paternal grandmother,"

"It was nice to meet you, Mrs Allen," Reese says, and then he turns and all but runs away down the road.

* * *

Bart comes barreling down the hallway and through the living room and into the kitchen half an hour later.

"Why didn't you wake me?!" he asks in a panic when he comes back into the living room, his clothes a mess and shoveling tablespoons of cereal into his mouth.

"I thought that if you slept through your alarms, you needed the sleep," she replies, looking up from her laptop, fingers stilling on the keys for a moment. "Your friend Reese came by asking for you, he wanted to check if you were okay. He seems nice,"

Bart stills looks annoyed, but relaxes slightly at the mention that someone came by. Then he actually looks at her face and he stiffens.

"He... asked for me," he says, a statement rather than a question.

"That's what I said," she replies, closing her laptop's lid. "Do you want to sit down, sweetheart?"

He does so, but not on the couch next to her. He almost just collapses backwards, into the armchair in the corner that he claimed as his favourite six years ago.

"So," she says, folding her hands "Barry,"

He flinches and looks guilty.

"I was going to tell you eventually," he says, looks down at his lap and clasping his hands. "I just... couldn't figure out how,"

She sets her laptop aside and leans forwards.

"Why?" she asks, the question she's been asking herself for the past half hour "Sweetheart, if this is about Metropolis... you don't have to try to  _be_ your gra-"

"It's not that!" he bursts in, eyes wide " _Grife,_ I  _promise,_ Grandma, it's nothing like that! I..."

He pauses, bites his lower lip, thinks about what he's going to say.

"It...it  _was_ Metropolis," he starts, looking absolutely earnest "I... I realised that I'm really not  _prepared_ to be a superhero, not the way I need to be, it's why I've been doing all the extra training and stuff, but..."

He looks down again, inhales deeply. Then, slowly, he exhales and looks back up.

"You always told me that I needed to wait for this world's Superman because he was going to be a trailblazer, a good example, the hero that would help people to not be  _afraid_ of people with powers and make it safer for the rest of us to be out there," he clenches his hands into fists, his shoulders going tense "The Superman we saw in Metropolis that day  _isn't that person._ Maybe he will be someday but he isn't _now_  so... so I figured... if Superman isn't that person in this universe, at least, not right now,  _someone_ has to be,"

He lets the tension go and then smiles.

"In all the stories you've told me, Grandpa Barry was like that," he says "and I think that, in this world, I'm gonna have to be, just in case Superman doesn't start being that eventually. And Grandpa Barry was  _really_ good at it, so..." and now he looks a bit embarrassed "...so I started using his name, because I already had his name  _anyways_ I've just been using a different nickname and... and it helps me feel closer to him, like I can be more like him, be the person the world's gonna need,"

She leans further forwards and reaches out and arm, clasps one of her hands over his.

"Okay, sweetheart," she says, smiling reassuringly "If that's what you need, okay,"

"I  _would_ still like to be Bart at home, though," he says "if you want to keep calling me that,"

She squeezes his hand slightly and smiles a bit wider.

"Sure thing, Bart," she says, and then "I am  _so proud of you,_ sweetheart,"

He smiles back and his eyes start watering.

"Thanks, Grandma," he says, voice sounding a bit thick.

She leans back and opens her arms and he lunges out of the chair and across into a hug.

* * *

After that talk, she manages to get him to ease back a little more, and things start to settle back into a routine resembling how they were before Metropolis.

(Only  _resembling_ though. Things can't ever really go back to how they were)

* * *

They sit down at the kitchen table, pens and pencils and crayons and paint, paper of every size from A6 to A3 spread out across it.

"We need to decide what it's going to be made of first," Bart says, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand.

"I'll handle that," Iris says, pulling a sheet of A4 and a pen over to herself and starting to make notes. "Do you have any ideas for what you want it to look like?"

"Similar to Grandpa Barry's, definitely," Bart says, picking up a pencil and starting to sketch "But maybe incorporating some colours other than red and yellow? Maybe some grey?"

"You keeping the emblem?" she asks.

" _D_ _uh,_ " he replies, "Definitely not changing  _that,"_

"Just remember, even if you make it similar to your grandfather's suit, yours is going to be armoured in some way, not just skintight,"

"Remind me why you're so insistent on this armour thing? None of the other speedsters had armour. Maybe some padding, but definitely not  _armour,"_

"The other speedsters all had healing factors.  _You_ don't,"

"So it was fine for the others to get hurt because it'd heal quickly, but I heal slowly so I have to be protected from injury,"

There's just the slightest hint of sarcasm in his voice.

"No," she replies, pen still scratching over paper "they just had an excuse to use when their loved ones nagged them about having more protective clothing,"

Bart laughs.

* * *

Bart makes a noise somewhere in the realm of  _HWURK_ and catches himself on the table with one hand, the other covering his mouth while his eyes are wide.

Iris looks up from the sketch that she's helping modify in concern.

 _"_ I accidentally drank the paint water," Bart wheezes, before dashing away from the table to turn the tap on and stick his mouth under it.

He glares at her when she doesn't even try to hide her laughter.

* * *

" _Spaceship grade material?"_  Bart asks, eyes blown wide and his mouth gaping  _"_ Grandma Iris,  ** _how?_** _"_

She smiles as she hands the deep red material over, feeling quite satisfied that she can amaze him even now that he's technically an adult.

"I have my ways," she replies, deliberately making it seem as mysterious as possible. And then she laughs. "You'd be surprised how many contacts you make in the journalism industry, sweetheart. And how many favours you can be owed,"

"You are the  _absolute coolest,"_

"I know," she replies "So, shall we get this suit of yours made?"

" _Yes,"_ Bart says, clutching the material to his chest, grinning widely and almost manically, his eyes sparkling so much they might as well have stars in them.

* * *

She groans loudly and Bart looks up in concern.

"I just sewed my sleeve to the undersuit," she says, frustrated, annoyed, and resigned to what's going to come next.

Bart starts laughing. Very, very hard.

"Shut  _up,"_ she snaps at him, without any real heat in it and a hint of humour of her own "I'm a  _journalist,_ not a  _seamstress,"_

Bart just keeps laughing.

* * *

"Grandma," Bart says, pausing in his work. "I just realised something,"

She looks up and makes a  _hmm?_ sound that he takes as a cue to continue.

"We're not going to be able to fit this suit into a ring," he says.

There's silence. And then they both laugh.

"No, but really," Bart says afterwards "This suit is  _not_ going to fit into a ring. Where are we going to keep it?"

"You have a closet for a reason, sweetheart,"

"I'm going to keep my high-tech, armoured, made-of-spaceship-grade-material superhero costume in my  _closet?"_

"Do you have a better idea?"

"...I will by the time we finish making it,"

(He doesn't)

* * *

The world changes  _again_ when Batman and Superman face off in Gotham. And then  _again_ when they have to team up to fight Doomsday, and Wonder Woman arrives as well.

And Superman dies.

This time, they get the news via the TV, rather than being in the thick of it.

"He's going to be back, right Grandma?" Bart asks, sounding worried "He... he died and came back before, right?"

"We can only hope that things stay the same, sweetheart," Iris replies, wishing she could say  _yes._

They both know they're thinking the same thing, that maybe they were wrong about this world's Superman before, maybe he  _is_ going to be that beacon, that trailblazer. Just, in a different way, at a different time.

(Iris knows the look on Bart's face and knows that he's probably thinking something along the lines of  _couldn't hurt to have two of us_ )

* * *

A few months after that, Bart arrives home via vibrating through the wall into the living room and leaving no less than six separate scorch marks on the walls from lightning in addition to the person shaped one caused by vibrating through the wall.

Usually, even as an adult, he'd get scolded for that. Usually, he'd  _know_ he'd get scolded for it and wouldn't even think of doing it.

But this, as she discovers a few seconds after his rather dramatic entrance, isn't usually.

 _"BATMANASKEDMETOJOINTHEJUSTICELEAGUE!"_ he blurts out in the space of less than a breath.

Iris drops the book she was reading and is on her feet in a moment.

Bart is quite literally vibrating in place in excitement, causing a high pitched whir almost reminiscent of a VCR as he does so, his hands clasped in front of his chest and an ear to ear grin on his face.

"BatmanaskedmetojointheJusticeLeague," he repeats, almost looking faint.

" _Breathe,_ Bart," she says, grabbing his shoulders and almost wincing at the heat he's putting off "Remember to  _breathe,"_

He closes his eyes, breathes deeply in and out until he slows down and, and then he opens his eyes and is still grinning. He reaches up and grabs her forearms and almost starts bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

"Batman asked me to join the Justice League," he says, again.

"Batman asked you to join the Justice League," she copies, a grin to match his on her face.

"I'm  _going to be the Flash,"_ he says.

"You've been the Flash for months already, sweetheart," she says.

"But this  _makes it real,"_ Bart says, words almost whispered.

And then he starts laughing, and so does she, and they hug each other tightly.

* * *

It is often said that people have fates, have destinies.

It is less often said that  _universes_  have fates and destinies.

But that it is not often said does not means that it is not the case.

The speedforce is the origin of a speedsters power. It is extradimensional, sometimes considered a dimension unto itself. It ripples out across time and space in universes, and out across universes in the multiverse.

Once, in a multiverse, there was a universe. And that universe was a little... unique.

The speedforce ripples out across the multiverse and time and space, true, but that does not mean it is omnipresent.

In this universe, the speedforce could not reach out. It was, for a large part,  _blocked._  Incompatible with that universe.

And so, that universe’s fate was that it would not have a Flash, nor any other speedster. Those who would once have borne the speedforce’s power would exist, yes, but for them or any other to connect with it would be near impossible.

This universe would have its heroes, have its Justice League, but its fate was such that it would never know a Flash.

But a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane.

And love is so much more powerful than butterfly wings.

In a single, desperate moment, a grandmother and grandson crashed through spacetime and landed in this sole, lonely universe that would never know a Flash.

And in that moment, something changed.

The grandson was a speedster, something this universe was never supposed to know.

The force of a butterfly’s wingbeat can cause a hurricane.

The force of love changed the fate of a universe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND THAT'S ALL FOLKS  
> ...for this fic, anyways.
> 
> This thing is in a series for a reason. I am going to write so many more things for this AU. This AU is my _baby_ now.
> 
> Also, woooo, bookends! It's one of my favourite tropes and I love that I got to use it with this fic. Well... kinda. I didn't end on a similar scenario/situation, but I did end on the same style of narration, so it counts. I think.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [An Afternoon in Smallville](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8105527) by [gakorogirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gakorogirl/pseuds/gakorogirl)




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